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Ubuntu 10.04 Already Shortens The Boot Time

Phoronix: Ubuntu 10.04 Already Shortens The Boot Time

Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 1 was released last week and while it did not bring any major features yet for this Long-Term Support release of Ubuntu Linux to be released in April of 2010, it began to introduce some underlying changes like the switch to the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, X Server 1.7, and the complete removal of HAL. Our early benchmarks of Ubuntu 10.04 show that there are some negative performance regressions right off the bat, but that is from within the Linux desktop. One area that Canonical is focusing upon in particular with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is speeding up the boot process, so we decided to provide some benchmarks there too.

Well I don't have got such lowend hardware, but bootchart is about 15s with E8400 and a pure Kanotix install And there are even there are mounted filesystems in the fstab for other partitions than / - which is not the case on U. There you have to click on a partition to mount - the name of it is the very informative uuid then, what do you learn from this? Usefull only for 1 system installs those benchmarks.

"these kernel patches from Moblin remove a time delay in waiting for all devices before mounting the root file-system"

Are you telling me that after blowing $245 on an 80GB Intel X-25M 80GB SATA SSD, and upgrading the firmware and aligning the partitions and sectors and using TRIM tools.. on a laptop with hardware that never, ever, ever, changes, from the mic to the mouse... that Ubuntu WAITS to even mount the root fs until all devices respond?!? Is that what that flashing text cursor for one second is?! And then it initializes hardware devices.. one at a time?! NOT COOL. NOT. COOL.

Well I don't have got such lowend hardware, but bootchart is about 15s with E8400 and a pure Kanotix install

Would we expect any different distro, Kano? As deanjo said- shameless plug?

While boot times are nifty, I honestly wish they'd sort out PulseAudio problems (I go 20-40 minutes and there's a growing chance Pulse packs it up and I have to reboot on my main machine to get sound...sigh...) or back some other sound solution that actually works on all platforms correctly.

"these kernel patches from Moblin remove a time delay in waiting for all devices before mounting the root file-system"

Are you telling me that after blowing $245 on an 80GB Intel X-25M 80GB SATA SSD, and upgrading the firmware and aligning the partitions and sectors and using TRIM tools.. on a laptop with hardware that never, ever, ever, changes, from the mic to the mouse... that Ubuntu WAITS to even mount the root fs until all devices respond?!? Is that what that flashing text cursor for one second is?! And then it initializes hardware devices.. one at a time?! NOT COOL. NOT. COOL.

That's not just Ubuntu, every distro I've tried has some arbitrary boot delay to allow devices to settle. Without this delay, it becomes very difficult to boot from USB, for example.

I'm pretty sure the "blinking cursor" period is initrd initliazing. In Arch, you could shave a significant amount of time by removing unnecessary modules from that - but this is a tradeoff between generic hardware support and boot speed.

My solution on Arch was to create a "fastboot" initrd tailored to my hardware (only EXT4 and sata/scsi modules, not even keyboard/mouse support) and a slow generic intird as a fallback in case my hardware ever changed.